Topic: Unravelling an e-smith setup

[Peasant]

This posting is a bit long, so I apologise in advance:

I have been asked to upgrade a company's aging e-smith server (around 6+ years old) with SME 7, but on investigation the setup seems a bit convoluted.

E-smith has been set up to collect e-mail using multidrop, which means
from one mailbox. The setting points to mail.mycompany.co.uk, which I
assumed was at their ISP or hosting company.

E-smith is acting as a gateway, which means that it has two network cards,
the external one (192.168.254.1) connected to their router (ADSL provider
is telewest). Internal one (192.168.1.1) connects to a hub, and thence to
the internal network.

All sounds pretty straightforward doesn't it? However, when speaking to
their IT bod, it turns out they also have a 'backup' e-mail server with
their web hosting company should something go wrong with their network.
Running 'dig mycompany.co.uk MX' results in the following:

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mycompany.co.uk.               IN      MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
mycompany.co.uk.        3600    IN      MX      30 www.mycompany.co.uk.
mycompany.co.uk.        3600    IN      MX      50 mxbackup.webhost.net.
mycompany.co.uk.        3600    IN      MX      20 mail.mycompany.co.uk.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mycompany.co.uk.        3348    IN      NS      ns0.webhost.com.
mycompany.co.uk.        3348    IN      NS      ns0.other.net.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
mail.mycompany.co.uk.   3600    IN      A      84.85.86.87
www.mycompany.co.uk.    3600    IN      A       100.101.18.10
ns0.other.net.         95122   IN      A       100.101.16.99
ns0.webhost.com.       2052    IN      A       193.16.250.7

The mxbackup.webhost.net is the backup facility provided by their webhost.

If I open a web browser while at the company, and go to
www.whaitismyip.com (or similar) the result I get is 84.85.86.87. IOW
mail.mycompany.co.uk points to the IP allocated by telewest. Going to grc.com
and running shields up shows that ports 110 and 25 are open. To my
inexperienced mind this means there is a mail server at the company
somewhere, and my guess is e-smith, despite how it has been configured.

The current e-smith box is to be replaced with a new one running sme
server 7, but I don't want to do anything until I can unravel this.

The history of the current e-smith box is that it was originally
configured to be a file server, but this was then moved to another machine
and it became the gateway when it was discovered that the router supplied
by their new ISP did not have a firewall (this was about 4 years ago). The
only configuration interface for the router displays the connection status
and nothing else.

Can anyone shed some light on what may be happening here?

Many thanks

[mmccarn]

Perhaps the original SME box was setup using an expensive internet connection that was only intermittently established - then your MX configuration makes sense:  No Internet? SMTP to SME fails, sender uses backup MX instead.  Every "x" minutes SME dials up, gets email using "ETRN" or Fetchmail and hangs up.

Fetchmail doesn't require that you have an MX record pointing to the SME box, but it doesn't hurt, either.

Look at some of the "Received from..." headers in email on your server - did the email pass through the ISP's MX server, or did it get delivered straight to your SME?

If it went through the ISP's server, did it get to your box using ETRN or Fetchmail? (Hopefully fetchmail will add some headers to the message...)

Good Luck!

[cactus]

E-smith has been set up to collect e-mail using multidrop, which means
from one mailbox. The setting points to mail.mycompany.co.uk, which I
assumed was at their ISP or hosting company.

IMHO this seems to me to be a default setting when not used ever... on my SME 7 I seem to remeber seeing those entries in the configuration DB as well.